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Jean Jouzel

Biography

Jean Jouzel obtained his diploma in Physical Chemistry from École Normale Supérieure de Chimie Industrielle, Lyon, in 1968. In 1974 he was awarded a PhD from the Faculté d’Orsay, Paris, for his work on deuterium and tritium in hailstones, which marked the beginning of his interest in extracting information about Earth system processes and change using water isotopes. Jouzel has been a research scientist at CEA, France’s nuclear energy research center, since 1973 where he served as head of the Geochemistry Laboratory from 1986 to 1991. Starting in 1992, he was associate director of the newly formed LSCE. From 2001 to 2009 he was Director of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, which combine five laboratories in Paris doing climate research. He is currently Senior Scientist at LSCE. He has served as Vice Chair of the IPCC from 2002 to 2008, and was elected to a new term in 2008.

Jouzel has made key scientific contributions that have transformed paleoclimate research: (1) theoretical foundation for understanding how water isotopes encode environmental and climatic information; (2) measurement and interpretation of unique paleoclimatic records, specifically deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica; and (3) direct simulation of ice core proxies using sophisticated climate models. Jouzel has authored or co-authored over 260 papers in the professional literature, which have collected more than 20,000 citations. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Milankovi´c Medal of the European Geophysical Society in 1997 and the Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 2003.